I switched to mac when when MS lost its mind and came up with Vista--it was unusable, so much so that switching cost to mac was lower than trying to get Windows to work. Nowadays the only reason I stay with Mac is because I make iOS apps and realize it will be annoying if I abandon Mac. Apple is no more in a "just works" business. It's in a lock-in business. I used to be delighted to download their new OS's, and I'm sure everyone used to too, but nowadays I NEVER download their new versions and try not to upgrade as much as possible, I've been burned too many times and lost so many hours of productivity because the upgrade fucked me up
> Apple is no more in a "just works" business. It's in a lock-in business.
No such change has happened between 2007 (MS Vista time frame) and now. People familiar with Apple since 1980-something know very well that it's always been about both of the above: just works for the end user, and a lock-in business.
If anything, it's less locked in now than it used to be, because of the use of Intel processors (that was a big shocker in the Mac world). You can get a bootleg OS/X image to run under VirtualBox. I have such an image running over top of Windows 7; I use it to compile and test OS/X binaries of a FOSS program that I developed.
In the 1980's I had a clone of an Apple II+ computer. Apple did their best in their operating system software to detect clones and try not to run on them. Clones were the illegal work of the devil, according to Apple. By contrast, the IBM PC's spawned a thriving clone market.
Whether lock-in has bettered or worsened depends on perspective. While OS X can be shoehorned to run on Hackintoshes and VMs now, I can't remember any time when it was virtually impossible to install a custom operating system on Apple hardware until the iPhone came out (and, eventually, when the iPhone 3GS closed up the bugs that allowed the bootloader's security checks to be cirvumvented; said bugs were the only way to install a custom OS - like Android - on an iPhone). As far as I know, the software on Apple's desktops and laptops has always been unrestricted (as I know firsthand; literally all my PowerPC Mac hardware runs OpenBSD nowadays).
i could have phrased it better. What I really wanted to say was Apple doesn't seem like a Missionary company it used to be anymore. Sounds ironic to say this to one of the most valuable companies in the world, but everything it does nowadays feels like it comes out of neediness and not out of a long term vision. They used to keep users because Apple devices "just worked" and it's obvious the existing users wouldn't leave. But nowadays I'm at the same point where I was when I was about to make the decision to jump ship from Vista to mac back then. As I mentioned, the reason I can't easily do that is because of their "lock-in" mechanism, not because they have great products. These lock-ins will break eventually unless they step up and do something about this, and I don't think it will ever happen
